Real question: Has anyone (i.e. Google) explained why people would keep publishing content on the web when search engines are just going to slurp it up and never pass users to the source?

[murtaugh@mastodon.social]

Real question: Has anyone (i.e. Google) explained why people would keep publishing content on the web when search engines are just going to slurp it up and never pass users to the source?

[patrick_h_lauke@mastodon.social]

@murtaugh i believe they only considered the use case of ecommerce site owners, making sure their purchase journeys are "agent-friendly" (see Web-MCP and similar bullshit). for raw "content" they might think they slurped up enough and can always dip back into wikipedia, trusting that people's desire to have a reliable source of info will happen regardless

[afeinman@wandering.shop]

@murtaugh No, and we already played this game with AMP. We lost.

[sarasoueidan@front-end.social]

@murtaugh THIS.

[prism@infosec.exchange]

@SaraSoueidan @murtaugh They won't. They'll just tell the Google machine, because that's how people get information now. Learn the Google. Love the Google.

[gorsefan@ravenation.club]

@murtaugh yes. Even before this latest change, AI to publishers feels like FaceBook to local newspapers circa 2010

[joeri_s@mstdn.social]

@murtaugh If google no longer links through to content it crawls, why wouldn’t a site just put this in their robots.txt?

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /